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INTRODUCTION

I have long been fascinated by the relationship between law and society. My book, Legal Transplants (Edinburgh, 1974) was written in 1970 but despite my best efforts I could not find a publisher until 1974.

Then the book fell stillborn from the press. It took more than a decade before it attracted atten­tion. The main theses are simple:

1 There is no necessary correlation between law and the society in which it operates. Of course, there is some connection but precisely what that is is not inevitable, and may often be tenuous. Law is very much the culture of the lawmakers.

2 Law once created lives on even in very different circumstances, also for a very long time, even for centuries.

3 Law transplants easily, even to very different societies. I would add that governments are usually little interested in making law, especially private law, and leave this task to subordinate lawmakers, such as judges and law­book writers, to whom they do not give the power to make law.1

B.

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Source: Cairns J.W., Plessis P.J. du. (eds.). Beyond Dogmatics: Law and Society in the Roman World. Edinburgh University Press,2007. - 236 p.. 2007

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